1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an imaging apparatus and an imaging method, and more particularly to a technology suitably used for a digital video camera or a digital still camera that records a captured image as digital data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, there has been a remarkable gain in popularity of a digital video camera and a digital still camera that convert a captured image into digital data to record the data. In the digital video camera and the digital still camera, a format or parameters of digital data to be recorded are determined according to user's setting or a recording medium.
For example, in the case of the digital video camera, resolution that the user can select may vary from one recording medium to another. The user can select quality of a moving image to be recorded by selecting a recording mode such as standard (SP) or long time (LP). This selection is allowed to the user because of inverse proportion between quality of a moving image to be recorded and a recording period of time. In other words, a recordable period of time (photographable period of time) is shorter when the user records a moving image in a high-quality mode, and longer when the user records the moving image in a low-quality mode.
As another example, in the case of the digital still camera, the user can select a recording format of resolution of image/compression rate/JPEG or RAW. The compression rate of the image and quality of the image to be recorded are inversely proportional to each other.
However, determination of parameters during image data generation is burdensome for the user, and hence substantially one parameter is fixed to be used in many cases. For example, in the case of the digital camera, when photographing is expected to last for a long period time on such an occasion as a wedding, the photographing is continued in a set state of a long photographing mode.
There has been an attempt made to automatically determine parameters during image data generation. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-260714 discusses a technology that, in a digital still camera including an image data reception function based on a communication function, changes a compression rate of image data based on image data received via communication and a remaining memory recording capacity of the digital still camera.
This technology enables recording of both of a received image and a captured image in a recording medium by reducing an image data size even when another image different from the captured image is received by the communication function. Thus, even without any user operation, a parameter that is a compression rate (parameter that becomes a parameter for image quality) can be automatically changed to be set.
However, according to contents described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-260714, it is only for the received image data that parameters can be automatically determined during image data generation, and other cases cannot be dealt with. For example, in the digital video camera, when the user captures a moving image in a long recording mode, the user cannot automatically change the mode to a high image quality mode by using a given event as a trigger.